Austin Pioneers
The Austin Pioneers, based in Austin, Texas, were one of eight founding franchises of the Big State League in 1947, and their name came from a fan. Owner Edmund P. Knebel, a Seven-Up bottling magnate who had turned down a professional contract from the Detroit Tigers after his college career at Blinn College in 1916, held a naming contest drawing nearly five hundred submissions. A panel of Austin civic leaders selected five finalists: Pioneers, Colonels, Texans, Aces, and Jaycees. Fans voted, and fifteen-year-old Murray Forsvell, the first to suggest Pioneers, won a season pass. Knebel had specifically ruled out "Senators" and "Rangers," and the University of Texas held a prior claim on "Longhorns" and "Steers."
Knebel spent $200,000 of his own money in nine weeks to build Disch Field, named at the city council's insistence for legendary University of Texas baseball coach William J. "Uncle Billy" Disch, on a city-owned tract just off Barton Springs Road. The park seated 3,500 in the grandstand and 2,000 in the bleachers. The home opener, scheduled for April 26, was rained out and pushed to April 27 against the Wichita Falls Spudders. Governor Beauford Jester threw out the first ball. The Pioneers won 12-6, snapping the Spudders' eight-game winning streak, in front of a rain-thinned crowd of 2,260.
On the field, the Pioneers finished seventh in that first season of 1947, a predictable result: the four western clubs in the league had to build rosters from scratch, while the four eastern teams had competed together in the East Texas League the year before. In the stands, though, Austin outperformed nearly everyone, drawing 106,099 fans in 1947 for the league's fourth-best attendance, then setting a franchise record of 188,193 in 1949 and becoming the circuit's perennial attendance leader. The Pioneers never won a Big State League pennant across nine seasons, and only two players who passed through Austin went on to major league careers: George Estock and John Andre.
After the 1955 season, Knebel and the Big State League sold Austin's territorial rights to the Class AA Texas League. Allen Russell, the owner of the Beaumont Exporters, acquired the franchise and moved his operation to Austin, renaming it the Senators and later the Braves, operating out of Disch Field through 1966. The city demolished the stadium in 1969. Knebel, who retained ownership of the ballpark throughout the Senators years and leased it to Russell, was named Austinite of the Year in 1959 and entered the Austin Baseball Hall of Fame in 1965, shortly before his death at seventy-two.
The Big State League was a Class B circuit that ran from 1947 through 1957, fielding teams exclusively from across Texas. Named for the state's reputation as the nation's largest, the league stretched from the Gulf Coast to the plains of West Texas, bringing professional baseball to cities the higher-classification Texas League had never reached.
